BooRah - Inside the Buzz

Kosmix, recently expanded their website to include a lot more than just health, travel and autos. Kosmix specializes in “algorithmically generated topic pages” for broader navigation/exploration unlike Google. In launching the new website, they’ve integrated BooRah to power restaurant searches. Kosmix uses our powerful restaurant search XML API in real-time to offer highly relevant results. E.g, check out Restaurants in Los Gatos, CA or Restaurants in San Francisco,CA to see the topic page and easy navigational links to BooRah and other sites.

Read Kosmix launch analysis from Anand Rajaraman, one of the Kosmix founders, here.

Time.com announced it’s 50 Best Websites for 2008 earlier this week. Even though we didn’t quite make it to the list, we’re thrilled to have received a mention in their evaluation. We know we have a few things to fix to hit the next level of usability for consumers and are working diligently within our constraints to provide a very valuable service. Many thanks to Anita Hamilton.

Last week Peggy Anne Salz also did a very extensive piece about our mobile application on msearchgroove.com. Her perspective on blending social recommendations and semantic search is quite creative and we’re definitely looking into enhancing features in that direction.

WapReview.com also wrote a review about our mobile service and we are humbled by Dennis’ evaluation.

As always, we look forward to valuable feedback from you in building a service that you’ll love.

We all have had our share of interesting experiences while eating out. Share a fun story about your restaurant experience and enter to win a $75 Gift card. Here’s one for starters:

A few of us (some colleagues were traveling on business) once visited this popular thai restaurant. As we got to the restaurant, we realized that we all had to sit on raised bamboo floor and take our shoes off. Quite a predicament! One of the gals refused to take her shoes off, turns out she hadn’t changed her socks in a few days and was concerned they’d smell. Finally, after much convincing, she agreed to take the socks off as well and sat little farther away from group with her feet spread outward. As we were ready to leave, some one from the adjacent table approached her, chatted for a few mins and handed her his business card. As luck would have it, the guy was a footwear designer and wanted to cast her in a footwear commercial! We all just couldn’t help but giggle and laugh at the whole situation when we found out about it later.

Now that may be an unusual story, but we’re sure some of you have some interesting aspects to share with us. Here are a few themes to trigger your memory :

• Romantic date(s)
• Family parties/get togethers
• Business meals or trips out of town
• Restaurants in your neighborhood that you hadn’t discovered in a decade
• Interesting ordering situations

So, just jot down a few quick comments from your experience in response to this blog and you’re entered to win $75 Gift Card.

We’ll award the gift card to the best story (in our sole determination) posted in the comments to this blog by the end of the day on June 18.  Please be sure to include your email address.

OpenID has come a long way since it’s inception a year and a half ago. It’s usage has gone mainstream, & open source libraries are available to help companies enable their own sites for OpenID. With BooRah’s growing user-base and multiple partners we’re integrating with, there is no better time to support this open standard on our site. So, you can now login to BooRah with your OpenID and start experiencing seamless integration with some of our partners (others to come).

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